Should the dh_installinit really be marked "upstart only"? I am thinking more about merging back to Debian or even backporting where upstart may not be in use. Otherwise I think this patch looks fine, and I may try a test build to verify it. I happen to agree ntp should migrate to upstart.

You only seem to have ported part of the locking code over. You need the backgrounded lockfile-touch and the kill as well (otherwise the lock could time out on a very slow start), although quite how you're going to get the pid of the lockfile-touch process across to the post-start script I'm not quite sure.

Please try to avoid the use of a pidfile. Upstart's process tracking should be sufficient.

The apparmor code in the Upstart job appears to be new relative to the init script. Why?

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NTP can use this, or a similar technique, to emit an Upstart event when the time is synchronised. It would be nice to be able to react to this (although maybe not to block daemon startup indefinitely).

This debdiff adds an upstart job for ntp. Upstart job does the same thing SysV script does. In addition, it adds two features that are common requirement in production:

1) does one off sync before starting ntpd in foreground - off by default
2) syncs hardware clock after the one off sync - off by default

Many services, OpenStack's nova comes to mind, require time to be synced, rather ntpd started. By doing one off sync before starting ntpd, system will have correct time before nova-* services start. Nova service then needs to depend on started ntpd.

Hardware clock sync might be an overkill, but, IMHO, doing it right after we synced the OS time seems the best place to do it.

These days handled via systemd init script wrapper.
IMHO I don't think it still makes sense to add/convert upstart jobs for ntp.

If anything a native systemd job, but then systemd takes care of most basic time sync tasks on its own anyway.
That said - closing the bug by setting Opinion (which it is - an "old" opinion - in todays point of view)